It is early September. Just two months ago we shared passion, closeness, and connection. Each night Lynn draws me toward her and I follow. Even when we argue, we end the night together, bodies finding their way back to one another. That is my life.

Wait—when she says she isn’t coming back, that means… I can’t finish the sentence.

After Lynn, living with her mother, told me she wasn’t coming back, I no longer have a place in my own life.

Lynn’s mother, Diane, bought the house for us as a couple, and now she is selling it. At some level that makes sense. At most levels, nothing is registering—not the reality of it, not the loss of permanence.

Then I am staying with friends. Then other friends.

I don’t remember the order clearly. I remember sleeping in different rooms, different houses, waking up not quite sure where I am. Each place feels temporary, as if I am waiting for something to resolve before I can return to my real life. I do not yet understand that the life I am waiting for no longer exists.

Somewhere in this period, I shut down my private practice.

I don’t remember making a formal decision. I don’t remember being instructed to stop. I only remember the sense that I couldn’t continue, that something essential had been compromised, even if I didn’t fully understand how or why. It would not be until 2001 that I would be formally told I could not practice, but long before that, the practice was already gone.

Clients disappeared from my life without explanation.

Most of them had nothing to do with the grievances. They were not connected to John. So, they would have no idea at all about what was happening and why I was so suddenly and abruptly shutting down my practice and would no longer be available to them.

They had been coming to therapy, week after week, trusting me with their lives. Some were in the middle of crises—divorces, custody disputes, parenting struggles. I remember one mother in particular, whose children I had seen in play therapy. She and her former husband were locked in conflict, each hoping I would confirm that the other parent was unfit.

What stands out to me now is not the conflict, but the fact that I didn’t see abuse where it didn’t exist. That mattered to me. It always had. The work I had done up to that point had helped me resist exactly the kind of distortion I was now being accused of.

At some point, the mother reached out to me after I closed the practice. I don’t remember how I responded, or if I responded at all. I only remember the sense that I was vanishing from people’s lives without explanation, including my own.

The grievances themselves were surreal.

I was accused of planting memories—of encouraging beliefs in elaborate conspiracies involving Satanic ritual abuse. The accusations felt disconnected from everything I knew about myself, my work, and my ethics. They felt grotesque, like looking into a funhouse mirror that distorted every human impulse into something predatory or obscene.

Later, my lawyer would tell me that the Board knew the grievance letters had been written by John F. They were identical. Verbatim. The handwriting of a disturbed mind was visible even then. But at the time, that knowledge did not protect me. It did not slow the process. It did not prompt skepticism. Instead, it seemed to disappear into the machinery of confirmation bias.

I was not evaluated as a person in crisis. I was assessed as a professional threat.

I was told, implicitly, that I was incapable of treating complex trauma and dissociative disorders or conditions I had been working with thoughtfully and cautiously for years. The irony was unbearable, though I did not fully register it then. I was being accused of distortion while my own reality was dissolving.

My family knew that Lynn was no longer in my life. They had seen us together. They had witnessed our love, our ease, our joy—the way my face was lit up. They also knew my career was collapsing. They knew that everything I had worked toward—personally and professionally—was disappearing at the same time.

Somewhere in those conversations—with my parents, with my sister, with my brother—I found myself wanting them to be proud of me.

I don’t remember saying it outright, but I remember thinking it: that before everything collapsed, I had been doing well. I had been on track. For a time, I was earning nearly two thousand dollars a week. I could see the outline of a future that, by conventional measures, looked like success.

I imagine I mentioned numbers. I imagine I spoke in the language I knew they responded to.

What I don’t remember saying—what I quietly edited out—were the hotel rooms. The weeks spent staying close to Lynn during her hospitalizations. I remember referring instead to out-of-pocket medical expenses, as if that were the more acceptable explanation for where the money had gone.

Only later did I notice myself doing this.

Why was I explaining? Why was I translating love into something more defensible?

The answer came from much earlier.

One memory returns with physical certainty. I am young, in the back seat of the car. My mother is driving. We are coming home from a doctor’s visit. I feel dizzy. Nauseated. The world starts to narrow. There is no conversation. No checking in. I sit there quietly until everything goes dark. I have fainted.

It is treated as a story later. Something odd. Something faintly amusing. No one wonders what I felt before it happened. No one wonders whether I was scared.

Another memory flashes—different time, same rule. I’ve just arrived from the airport. My mother is asking questions, pressing for answers. I tell her I feel sick and ask if we can talk later. The response is irritation. My body has disrupted the moment. The conversation matters more than the fact that I don’t feel well.

In neither moment does comfort appear as a possibility. Not as a request. Not as an expectation. Not even as a thought.

Taken alone, each memory is small. Together, they form a pattern I recognized long before I had language for it: when I was unwell— physically or emotionally—it was handled as an inconvenience. Needs were managed, not shared. Care was functional, not relational. The same tone followed me into adulthood, echoed back by the same people.

So when I stood beside Lynn—terrified, devoted, unwilling to leave—I did not speak to my family in the language of fear or love. I spoke in numbers. In practicality. In explanations that would not be dismissed the way need had always been dismissed.

Of course they wouldn’t understand why I stayed close. They wouldn’t recognize that wanting to be near the person you love during a medical crisis isn’t a preference—it’s a need.

I didn’t articulate any of this then. I simply felt it and adjusted accordingly.

There were conversations. Phone calls. Exchanges of information.

What I did not fully register until much later was what never appeared in those conversations.

There was no curiosity about how I would live now.

No questions about what I would do if I could no longer work as a therapist. No recognition that the career I had built—carefully, deliberately, against the odds—had suddenly vanished. No acknowledgment that the love I had shared with Lynn was the kind people assume endures, not the kind that quietly disappears under the weight of illness and circumstance.

No one said, This must be devastating. No one asked, What happens next for you?

In retrospect, this absence was as disorienting as everything else. A reasonable person, hearing these facts, would have felt the gravity immediately. They would have wondered how someone survives the sudden loss of love, work, identity, and future all at once. They would have felt concern or at least asked the question.

Instead, the response remained emotionally neutral, procedural, incomplete, adding to the unreality of that time. It was as if the meaning of what was happening existed only inside my body and nowhere else.

I did not ask for help. I did not ask for a place to stay. I did not ask for anything at all.

Still, the question—How will you live now?—never came.

At some point, I began dating.

I don’t know where the idea came from. I don’t remember deciding I was ready, because I wasn’t. I had known love for what felt like a lifetime. Nothing about my life suggested I was prepared to begin again.

Even now, I can’t reconstruct my thinking. It makes no sense to me.

What I know is that I was still in love with Lynn. That hadn’t changed. The grief was intact. The attachment was intact. Only the structure around it had collapsed.

Looking back, the dating had nothing to do with connection. It was physical. Brief. Anesthetic. Pleasure arrived without meaning, without bonding, without relief. It didn’t touch the loss. It didn’t interrupt the grief.

I didn’t understand that then. I only knew that something was missing, and that whatever I was doing wasn’t reaching it.

What strikes me now is not that dating failed to heal me, but that no one I dated seemed to notice how absent I was. No one remarked on the fact that I was still in love with Lynn, that my emotional life had stalled somewhere months earlier. Or perhaps they noticed and didn’t know what to do with it.

I was moving through life as if anesthetized.

Eventually, I landed in a motel on the other side of the bridge. I rented the room by the month. It was cheap. It was quiet. It was nowhere. From there, Wilmington began to feel less like home and more like a place I was haunting.

I found work that did not require a clinical license. Direct care. Supporting people with mental illness, developmental disabilities, and physical disabilities. It was familiar work—work I knew how to do— and for a brief moment it felt like a way to stay, a way to remain in the city that held everything I had loved.

That illusion ended when John F. contacted my employer.

I don’t remember the conversation. I remember the outcome. Once again, the ground disappeared beneath me. Whatever tenuous hold I still had on Wilmington loosened.

Crossing the bridge over the Cape Fear River for the last time did not feel dramatic. It felt inevitable. As if the city itself had quietly withdrawn its permission for me to remain.

I did not understand then that I was leaving the place where my adult life had truly begun.

I only knew that there was nothing left to stay for.